To be pedantic, value is in the eye of the beholder. Cost is how much goes into something, Price is how much someone wants to pay, Value... that is much more subjective.

Oil costs $50 a barrel to pump, priced at $100 on the market but when it comes to value could be seen as providing $20,000 of human labor.

Not trying to defend AI junk, like seriously people, just do the work yourself. But value is such a hard thing to quantify.

I think there's a presumption from the industrial boom. A ton of textiles is useful whether it is gathered, cleaned, spun, woven, dyed and printed by hand or by machine. And that might extend to practical complex products like printed parts or buildings constructed by robots.

One problem, is the whole point of art is human expression. LLMs might be okay for design, except there's art in design. AI is cultural appropriation extended to all human expression.

Another problem is a lot of the practical content made is flawed. Imagine if machine-woven textiles were holey and had structural weaknesses that tore open easily, so we made fabric by machine anyway and had seamstressed sew patches over the holes.

(Not all industrial age machines were perfect, and sometimes we had issues, which would be corrected by better machines, but in this case, human interaction is allegedly part of the magic, with recorded human work being used to train future AI models. But we're being forced to worship the dark gods an awful lot for the meager blessings being returned.)

The third problem is machine thinking is unexpectedly resource intensive. We once imagined smart (conscious) agentic AI running on our PC or our smartphone. Now it takes immense data centers that gobble up more power and water than we have, during a water crisis. And the industry is so desperate about it they're polluting the air like it were, well, the industrial age. While we're in a pollution-driven climate crisis and mostly to make slop and faulty vibe code.